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Caves of Qud News

Roadmap to 1.0 🗺️ Caves of Qud Dev Update

Hey quddites!

As you probably know, we announced that Caves of Qud is finally releasing on Steam in its full glory later this year, after more than 15 years of work. But we haven’t talked a ton about how we get there and what’s left to do. So let’s get to it!

[h3]Very Soon: Spring Molting[/h3]

We’ve decided to put out one last pre-release feature arc on our Journey to 1.0. This update is already in private beta, coming to Patreon supporters extremely soon, and then going to open beta in early May & releasing a few weeks after that. Here’s what’s included:

- 🚨ALL NEW INTERFACE🚨 The much-touted, transformational UI redesign is complete! Fully mouseable, fully gamepaddable, and gorgeous, but all carefully designed to maintain the essence of what makes Qud Qud.
- a refresh of the starting town of Joppa, with as much texture & lived-in feeling as the rest of the world
- hundreds of new sound and visual effects
- 40 new achievements
- several new narrative touches, big bug fixes, & performance improvements



Gallery of the gorgeous new interface: https://imgur.com/a/slSlWbh

[h3]Summer & Fall 2024: Secrets til Launch![/h3]

We don’t want to spoil everything, but throughout summer and fall our central project will be to finish the main quest, and then add something to satisfy those who complete the entire narrative arc of Caves of Qud. We’ll add a more hands-on tutorial, too.

There’s also always tons of t’s to cross and i’s to dot when finishing a game: those last achievements, missing sounds and visual effects, more bugfixes, etc. All of these things will need to be built and tested behind closed doors, and they’ll keep us busy.

[h3]Late 2024: Launch[/h3]

No, we don’t have a date, as it’s still awhile away and we don’t want to be up against the marketing budget of the next Assassin’s Cry: Breath of the Duty (trademark pending).

Part of the lead-up to launch is preparing the game architecture so we can properly handle big meaty updates post-launch. Which begs the question…

[h3]What About After Launch?[/h3]

Yep! We’re going to keep updating the game! Major content and system releases. Of course how many exactly does depend on the financial realities of sales, but no matter what, we have two big DLCs planned already. We honestly don’t know yet if they’ll be paid purchases or free upgrades, but we’re thinking about the right approach.

We’re also considering how to best support other platforms. It’s not urgent or pressing, but we want to make sure we don’t code ourselves into a corner if/when the time comes to maintain several control schemes, hardware, etc.

[h3]Back to Work![/h3]

Those are all the updates for now. We’ll shout-n-video when we have Spring Molting up on Steam for you, but hopefully this clears up any lingering confusion about what comes next. Feel free to keep asking us questions on the Discord; we’re watching out for ‘em.

Live and drink,

Tanya, Alexandra, Jason, and Brian

Feature Friday - April 5, 2024

206.74
  • Bundles of noisegrass are now more appropriately priced.
  • Added ability icons to the gas breath mutations of breathing lizards.
  • Fungus-ridden robots now actually host fungi.
  • Spacetime vortices now remain stationary for the first round they appear, giving you a window to step outside their range.
  • Cragmensch and glittermensch are now harder to set on fire.
  • High-powdered magnets now indicate when they are destroyed due to application.
  • Your DV is now set to zero while you are dominating.
  • Stasis now freezes the timer on bombs.
  • Fixed a bug that caused interact nearby, the nearby objects list, and the looker object list to consider objects inside solids differently from one another.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the direction of the current local map to be displayed incorrectly when choosing a local map to travel to from the world map.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the item description in power switch abilities to be wrong.
  • Fixed a typo in murals describing the historic liberation of cities.
  • Fixed a bug that caused dynamic turret tinkers controlled by you to be unable to place turrets.
  • Fixed a bug in the ability text of turret tinkers that displayed the internal blueprint or table name it was using.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the target details text of a hidden sidebar to be clipped when using bio-scanning bracelet.
  • Fixed a bug that caused cleave to indicate a target was cleaved even when it was immune to effects.
  • Fixed a bug that caused zones below strata 50 of Eyn Roj to be devoid of creatures.
  • [modding] Fixed a bug that caused population items that did not specify a load strategy to be skipped.
  • [modding] Fixed a bug that caused load strategies on population groups to be ineffectual.
  • [modding] The full file path is now displayed when a conversation part referenced in XML cannot be resolved.

Feature Friday - March 29, 2024

206.72
  • Extradimensional psychic assassin weeps are no longer noted in your journal on sight.
  • You are now allowed to pick your target when there are multiple creatures available to beguile or proselytize in a cell.
  • Flying objects that become stuck (for ex. in webs) will now stop flying and fall.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some golems to retain their mental shield.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some golems to drop a corpse or their inventory on death.
  • Fixed a bug that rarely caused several webs to spawn stacked in a single square.
  • Fixed a bug that caused phase webs to break immediately.
  • Fixed a bug that caused phasing from phase webs to wear off immediately.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the phased VFX from rendering.
  • Fixed a bug that caused frost webs to behave differently for player and NPC use.
  • Fixed a bug that rarely caused fixed settlement ovens to appear in random encounters.
  • [modding] Added support for removing any blueprint tag by prefixing them with remove: e.g. removetag, removebuilder, removestat, etc.
  • [modding] Buttons in Options.xml can now declare an OnClick method.
  • [debug] We made some changes to modding population tables.
    • Populations and their groups with the same IDs are now merged by default, specify Load="Replace" to replace them.
    • Objects and tables can now be merged by explicitly specifying Load="Merge".
    • Any population item can now be removed by specifying Load="Remove".

Feature Friday - March 22, 2024

206.70
  • Added new visual effects to throwing axes and geomagnetic discs.
  • Poison-tipped spears are now thrown with the pointy end towards the target.
  • Throwing axes are now categorized under Thrown Weapons.
  • You are no longer required to die permanently in order to unlock the achievement 'Jeweled Dusk'.
  • Motorized treads can no longer rust.
  • There's now a popup message when you or a companion has a stat drained by a creature for the first time.
  • Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented popups from being displayed when equipment was removed by a pulse field magnet.
  • Fixed a messaging oddity when losing the use of dependent limbs, such as hands.
  • Fixed a bug that caused trails on thrown items to render over their sprite.
  • Fixed a bug that caused your average armor to not be recalculated when regenerating limbs.
  • Fixed a bug that caused dismembered limbs of named creatures to be referred to with an article.
  • Fixed a bug that caused dismembered limbs to not inherit the article of the creature they were dismembered from.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the "worn around wings" slot to lose its name after eating the Cloaca Surprise.
  • Fixed a bug that caused you to permanently lose your beak after eating the Cloaca Surprise.
  • Fixed a bug that caused your disguise to disappear in completely dark areas.
  • Fixed a bug that caused graffiti to sometimes not change the foreground color of a tile.
  • [modding] Added several configurable parameters to throwing visual effects: e.g. speed, arc, rotation, trail, color, etc.
  • [modding] The ending transparency of projectile trails can now be set with a full-length RGBA value, e.g. '#77bfcf60'.
  • [modding] Fixed a bug that caused transparency on custom projectile trails to be overriden.

Feature Friday - March 15, 2024

206.69
  • Added new hamsa effects to various grenades.
  • All heavy weapons will now be reloaded before each individual shot while using Sweep.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the automove interrupt code to be incorrectly 'sticky' in some situations.
  • Fixed a messaging oddity when attempting to recoil to the court of sultans in combat.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some factions to not gift their cybernetics credit wedges via the water ritual.
  • Fixed a bug that caused irisdual beam to misreport its dealt damage.
  • Fixed a bug that allowed you to lunge with a dismembered stinger.
  • Fixed a bug that caused thermal and freeze grenades to not have appropriate hamsa effects.
  • Fixed a bug that caused armed mines to be reported as disarmed in their description.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the item category of the scrapped waydroid to be incorrect.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the 'Auto-pickup of zero weight items' but skip picking up items with fractional weight.
  • [debug] Added a new debug option to show current faction reputation when looking at creatures that grant reputation.
  • [modding] Name is now a required property of population groups.
  • [modding] Added a Name to every population group.